Two things infrastructure and developer tools product people ignore too much
"Ugly things are ugly in much the same way the world over."; growth in software spending, one bank's kubernetes journey. Plus, air fryer steak.
Pricing determines your business model
First, check out this post on pricing from Jason - it’s great!
The two things I’ve seen infrastructure and developer tools product people ignore too much are:
the need for customers to use the tool in minutes, self-service
pricing as a feature and strategy driver.
Sellers think of pricing as the money they want to make, often justified to the buyer ROI spreadsheets. Instead, they should think of pricing as the constraints they’re using to determine overall strategy and product feature set.
Pricing also signals complexity: if the price is low, your software is probably simple and quick to use. If the price is high, it’s probably complex and hard to even get installed.
The higher the price, the harder it’ll be to get ROI…usually.
“I don’t only want a lower price because I’d like to spend less (who wouldn’t!) but also because cheaper stuff is usually easier for us to start using. We’ll pay more if we want to scale it and/or start encountering more complex problems. But let me do the simple stuff first with you.”
Ugly Things
When one studies something characteristic of a people it is wise to look at its best side, at least if one wants to learn anything. Ugly things are ugly in much the same way the world over. Only the best can teach us, and the best of anything is individual. Each country excels in some things, and in the rest is just the same as other countries: mediocre. - Design as Art, Bruno Munari
Cooking a Steak in an Air Fryer
I didn’t want to wait the 30 or 45 minutes of oven time to reverse sear a thick steak, so I did this:
Put the Air Fryer on 400F/200C. Season the steak with salt, pepper, whatever. Put a lot of olive oil on it, rubbing it all in. For a rare steak that’s kind of thick, cook seven or eight minutes, until the internal temperature is 110F or 115F. Probably ten at max. Take it out, put some butter on-top, along with cumin and chili powder if you’re me, and let it sit there for about five minutes. You could quickly sear it in a pan, but I didn’t. I was hungry. I’d sear it next time to get that slightly crunchy outside.
It’s never too early to start a revolution - Software Defined Talk
Once again, I wasn’t able to be on. That is a distressing trend!
This week’s episode with Brandon and Matt:
This week we discuss regulators slowing Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, Nutanix’s delayed earnings, GitHub's origins, Tech Stocks and staplers at Google. Plus, some thoughts on GM and Apple CarPlay.
Relevant to your interests
Gartner forecasts massive growth in software and IT services - There’s always money in the banana stands // “Software spending grew 8.8% in 2022 to $794bn. By 2024, spending on software is forecast to hit $1tn.”
Introducing S-GPT, A Shortcut to Connect OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Native Features of Apple’s Operating Systems - If I had the time, perhaps this would work to take the text from an webpage (with the Safari Reader thing that finds just the article), pass it to GPT for a summary, and then add it to a rolling text file.
VMware fuses multi-cloud management and k8s orchestration - ’“With Aria, I know the near-real-time state of the config of the environment. With Guardrails, I can create a desired landing zone on any environment – Kubernetes, containers or cloud – and continuously keep it under policy,” she explained. Within Aria Guardrails, the vendor’s graph technology “is constantly checking what changed” in all environments. And if those changes contradict a set policy, it applies guardrails targeted at cost, performance or security.’
ING on Building a Cloud Native Bank - It takes a lot of work to build your own platform, but the results can be great.
Jess Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM - (1) Episodes that talk about more diversity and inclusion, especially about women, really highlight Tyler’s curiosity production function. (2) you can see how he nibbles around the edges of a topic, circling around and around to find an entry into an answer. It can be badgering at times, but it’s more often a systematic elimination of possibilities and explanations. (3) you can see his guest, more or less, successfully counter the question by looking at priors, assumptions, and poor data. There’s also a lot of practical ideas and tactics for getting more women in STEM and widening up research and such to more people.
Logoff
See y’all next time!